I can sort of see where he is coming from. It's better to deal with it at the time rather than retrospectively as the defending team will still be punished if the referee fails to spot the dive and there's no mention of the player who doesn't dive but gets booked for diving. But still, Big Sam isn't really the ideal man to speak about the integrity of the game
It is certainly better to deal with it at the time but the problem is, as we all know, that it can be very difficult to be sure that someone has dived and it is a big call to effectively call a player a cheat.
I think the effect of this will not be that lots of players will get caught diving retrospectively but that diving will decrease hugely because the balance of risk and reward has changed. At the moment, when a player dives to get a penalty or get a player sent off then if they are successful they might win a match, if they are unsuccessful then they might get a yellow card - for a professional player it might almost be expected that they
should dive at least once. Now, because the potential punishment for getting caught
and the chances of getting caught are much higher, there is less of an incentive to dive.
I also think we will initially see quite a lot of players diving and, when they remember in mid-air that they might get caught, immediately jumping up and telling the ref that there was no foul and that they just slipped...
I also expect that fewer players will wrongly be accused of diving - most players who get wrongly booked for diving are well known for being divers and so refs are, even if only subconscioulsy, expecting them to dive. If there are fewer divers and fewer dives then there will be fewer mistakes by refs.
Hopefully see a lot less of this sort of thing as well: